In hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care facilities, it frequently is necessary to move a patient in a wheelchair or on a wheeled stretcher or bed from the patient's room to some other location in the hospital. Often such patients are being provided with intravenous feeding so that it is necessary to move the intravenous feeding bottle with the patient to the new location. For use in hospital rooms and the like, the intravenous feeding bottles typically are hung on a vertical pole mounted on a wheeled base. This permits ready movement of the pole to various locations adjacent the patient's bed to facilitate the work of the doctors, nurses, and other personnel entrusted with the care of the patient. Frequently, these intravenous feeding bottle support poles also have mounted on them a computerized self-contained metering device for accurately metering the rate of flow of fluid from the intravenous feeding bottle to the patient. These metering devices are quite expensive and subject to damage if they are dropped or the pole is tipped over.
Usually, two attendants are required to move a patient from the patient's room to the X-ray department or some other area of the hospital when the patient is on intravenous feeding. One of the attendants pushes the wheelchair or the wheeled stretcher or bed, and the other attendant steadies the wheeled intravenous feeding support stand and pushes it alongside the wheelchair or stretcher. Obviously, this is a waste of valuable personnel.
The alternative to using two attendants to push the wheelchair or bed from one location to another has been to attach the intravenous feeding stand pole directly to the wheelchair or bed. This, however, requires removal of the pole from its wheeled base to attach it to the wheelchair or bed. Alternatively, a separate pole is attached to the wheelchair or bed and the intravenous feeding bottle is moved from the wheeled stand to the pole attached to the patient-carrying wheeled device (wheelchair, stretcher, or the like). This latter transfer of the intravenous feeding bottle from one stand to another is relatively easy to accomplish for feeding bottles having a simple clamp-type droplet control device on the tube between the bottle and the patient. When, however, an electronic metering device of the type described above is employed, it is also necessary to transfer this device from one pole to another. This requires extra time and furthermore, presents the potential for dropping the metering device and damaging it in the transfer.
Separate I V pole attachments have been made for wheelchairs and wheeled beds or stretchers in the past. A typical device for a wheelchair is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,709,556 to Allard et al. This patent discloses a collapsible tubular I V pole which has attachments connected to it for supporting it on the horizontal and vertical frame members of a wheelchair. Intravenous feeding stands or poles for attachment to a bed or wheeled stretcher are disclosed in the patents to Shepherd, U.S. Pat. No. 2,696,963, Scudder, U.S. Pat. No. 2,470,524, Alexander, U.S. Pat. No. 3,709,372, and Raia, U.S. Pat. No. 2,957,187. All of these patents disclose I V bottle support poles or stands which are attached to the frame of a bed or stretcher. The attachments are semi-permanent in nature, since the poles are not mounted on a separate wheeled stand.
The patent to Berge, U.S. Pat. No. 4,305,601, is of interest to the overall subject matter since it discloses a means for interconnecting a grocery shopping cart and a wheelchair for movement together. This is accomplished with a hitch assembly which is releasably attached to the wheelchair and rigidly attached to the shopping cart. A foldable drawbar is used to interconnect the shopping cart and wheelchair for movement together through the store.
While it is not directed to a wheelchair or stretcher application in any way, a patent to Freeman, U.S. Pat. No. 4,174,120 illustrates a rigid bar connector for interconnecting a bicycle and a wheeled cart together to permit the cart to be towed by the bicycle. When not in use, the tow bar folds to a generally out-of-the-way position on the bicycle.
It is desirable to provide a rugged, simple to use, and relatively inexpensive device for interconnecting a wheelchair or wheeled stretcher or the like to a wheeled I V pole to permit a single attendant to move a patient in a wheelchair or on a stretcher from one point to another in a hospital without interrupting the I V fluid connection to the patient. It further is desirable to move the standard I V pole mounted on a wheeled base along with a wheelchair or wheeled stretcher with a rigid and sure interconnection between the wheelchair and wheeled I V pole stand.